Here Comes the Bride Read Online Free Page A

mistake.
    She massaged her tense neck. “Okay,” she said. “It may already be too late to do anything, but we’ll give it a try.”
    Dinner was strained at best. Walter and Winnie held hands and smiled at each other besottedly all through the meal, while Nick and Fiona frowned. The couple didn’t seem to notice. Or that the conversation flagged.
    The possibility that she and Nick sway this impetuous twosome looked bleak indeed.
    When dinner was finished, Nick scraped back his chair. “It looks like you two want to be alone. Why don’t I drop Fiona at her hotel, maybe even show her some of the town’s nightlife along the way?”
    “Oh, that’s nice of you, dear,” Winnie exclaimed. “I did want Walter to stay and help me decide about the placement of the flowers in the gazebo for the ceremony.”
    Fiona’s mouth gaped open. Before she could object, Nick assisted her up from her seat and whispered in her ear, “Trust me.”
    Trust him? The man wanted to take her away from her father when time was a scarce commodity. She wasn’t about to trust him.
    “What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped a few minutes later as they cleared the table. Fiona dogged his heels, carrying a stack of dishes inside. “I don’t want to see this town’s nightlife and I don’t want to go back to my hotel.”
    “We need a plan if we’re going to stall the wedding. And we can’t very well have a strategy session right here under their noses, now, can we?”
    They’d reached the kitchen. Fiona slid the dirty plates onto a peacock-blue tile countertop and faced him squarely. “A strategy session?What’s wrong with setting them down and having a little heart-to-heart talk?”
    Nick rinsed a plate and dropped it into the dishwasher. “Wouldn’t work. We’d come off sounding like irate parents lecturing a pair of willful teenagers. We’re going to have to come up with something better.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like I don’t know yet. That’s why we need to talk.”
    Fiona handed him another plate. “Why is it you’re against this wedding?” she asked, gazing up at him. “Besides the ridiculous notion that you think my father chases women for their money?”
    Maybe he shouldn’t have said that. It had been a jaded thought, but after he’d seen Walter with Fiona, his mind had taken a right turn. The guy’d been a husband, a father, and though that didn’t eliminate all men from the louse category, it did cast Walter in a more favorable light.
    At least he would give him the benefit of the doubt for the time being.
    “Statistics,” he said dryly. “We live in the divorce capital of the country, the place where those made-in-heaven romances come to die.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “And that’s what you think will happen to Walter and Winnie?”
    “That’s the odds, like ’em or not.”
    “And when it does, you believe my father will want a chunk of your aunt’s money?”
    He’d seen that—and worse—in his practice. What two people could do to each other in the name of love had ceased to surprise him a long time ago. He’d been an idealistic young lawyer once, had taken on no more than the usual number of divorce cases, but when the word got around that he always won his clients a sizable settlement, his caseload skyrocketed. He was the new young gun in town and soon he was trying celeb cases, not just for the impetuous of Hollywood, but for rich and powerful clients as well. The better he became at what he did, the less he liked it.
    Sooner or later they all came, looking for the easy out, the painless divorce. Lately he’d been called to consult on some of the more difficult cases around the country.
    That’s where he’d been the past week—and what he’d seen hadn’t exactly endeared the institution of marriage to him.
    Fiona wondered how Nick had gotten so cynical in his thirty-some years. “Tell me,” she said. “Did Winnie get my father to sign that prenuptial agreement?”
    If she had,